Field

Field

What can I write of?
That I remember the blood red of the planks of the back yard picnic table
that Celeste sat upon, Celeste who stretched to the skies when I was small and measured myself by
brick walls.

How is life so sad and yet so ample?
Ramon
Fernandez who spoke to Wallace Stevens
cannot help me,
only the dusk with its mustards and blues can say
anything and it insists

that I am beautiful, and that you
are beautiful too–

And that, honestly,
does not correspond to
the blink of
a letter,
rather to the word “mainly”
and “plants”,
and, also, maybe, “green,”
but only that green that is no longer
green as night falls, and the”‘mainly” that means
inevitable
and the plants that will grow
regardless,
even if no one visits our graves,
the ones with the frayed
fronds that remember us
as birds and our flight
as directional–

“How is life so sad and yet so ample?” A question for the ages, and I love the Stevens reference–I often wonder why he dragged poor Ramon into that poem–he is a disconcerting rather looming presence, as is your Celeste, both seeming to partake, as they do, of a reality that is too stringent for imagination but must always be reiterating itself in our own precepts and perceptions. A beautiful mood poem, k–full of the music of our mortality.